Jon Butler's God in Gotham: The Miracle of Religion in Modern Manhattan is not a book, Butler would be the first to tell us, that anyone should have expected to read (or write). The equation of Manhattan with modernity and modernity with secularization has long been hardwired into the scholarly and popular imagination. Butler wants to disrupt these circuits. It is not that Manhattan was not secular but rather that religion flourished there beyond all expectations between the late nineteenth century and 1960.Footnote ¹

From James Baldwin to Abraham Heschel to Dorothy Day to Judy Blume, Butler paints a vast and compelling canvas. Some Manhattan religion stemmed from the borough's status as a media center, and Norman Vincent Peale, Bishop Fulton Sheen, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., and even, for a time, Billy Graham all thrust themselves into the city's proverbial bright lights. Much of it came from dogged institution building. Butler's wry appraisal of theoretical scholarship on religion—“dizzying sophistication if not crystalline clarity”—rests alongside his conviction that religion's influence rested upon the nitty-gritty of synagogue and church construction as well as the dozens of associations and groups formed on the platform of each congregation.Footnote ² That parts of God in Gotham resemble a Zillow listing is not an accident. No real estate, no—well, almost no—religion.

Among the many pleasures of God in Gotham is renewed exposure to Butler's contrarian spirit. Some of his essays over the past three decades are canonical. Did the eighteenth-century Great Awakening really happen? (He has doubts.) Why does religion disappear in our accounts of the modern United States? (Thanks in part to Butler, it no longer does.) The same incisive intelligence is evident in God in Gotham and provides wonderful raw material for an exchange between Butler and our distinguished reviewers. I will not spoil the conversation, but Wallace Best, Deborah Dash Moore, and Tom Tweed test some of Butler's claims while professing admiration for the work's elegance and scope. Butler offers a spirited and characteristically self-deprecating response. The University of Minnesota History Department—where Butler, having retired from Yale, is now a research scholar—hosted a Zoom version of this forum in January 2021. The quality of the contributions that evening, and the sheer fun had by participants (Butler most of all), have whetted our collective appetite for this print version.

Read on!